Session #072, Work #062

I will consider this probably the best painting I have done so far this year. It really has a bit of everything. Extreme color, reflections, naturally bright colors, full value scale and what I call fluff (a mass of jumbled information that is hard to paint).

This has also been the longest single session for a painting also, I wonder if there is a coloration? The last painting I worked on for a long time, which spanned several sessions, turned out really well also. I had a great time getting the reflection in the Google Nexus tablet just right. At one point early into the painting I was getting worried because things were not going well, but I stuck with it and trusted that if I worked at it things would turn around, and i did. The Kiwi was surprisingly hard to paint, it was hairy so it had a very structured fluffiness to it that was hard to capture. The paper hay, or whatever you call it, in the background was difficult. This kind of fluff is always hard to paint, its difficult to describe it without painting every single strand of hay. This kind a generalization I need to work on.

The Painting

Photo in north light.

Photo on easel in unnatural light.

The Setup

My hierarchy of painting importance

Drawing

Value

Edges

Composition

Color

Drawing

How can I improve the drawing

This is interesting, I didn’t focus very much on drawing this perfectly, and I got a bunch of things wrong. But I believe the painting to be very strong regardless. I learned from my last two drawings that I need to really test those angles multiple times. I think if I would have gotten that correct the drawing would have been much more solid.

Value

How can I improve the values?

The intense colors are very deceptive in value. Through previous paintings I knew that I would usually make the values too dark on things like apples and oranges and I corrected it well in this painting, but only for the apple and orange. The reflection in the Nexus is way to light, and the nexus box intense colors are to light in a few areas. Also the Kiwi is too dark on the side facing the light.

Practice makes perfect here, I really liked this setup, I may revisit it again.